Tag: baseball

I can’t ever be mad about Freddie Freeman

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Trust me, bro: Freddie Freeman becomes the only player in MLB history to have more than one walk-off homerun in the World Series.  That’s it.

When the day is over, I couldn’t give two shits over who wins the World Series.  Obviously, I would prefer it to be the Blue Jays, but as I’ve said before, the Dodgers are inevitable, and prior to the start of the series, I had flippantly predicted that it would be the Dodgers in five, and so far, my prediction is still in play.

Yoshinobu Yamamoto is pitching like a man possessed, with two straight complete games, playing like a man who was worth a $330M contract, and the golden boy Shohei Ohtani seems to have figured out playoff baseball, and over his last few games, has been hitting home runs in every single one and OPSing like 5.000 or so it feels.

Oh and make no mistake, the MLB media machine and all of its stage-six clingers are absolutely all the fuck over this Japanese invasion, and it’s getting to a point where I feel like I’m going to resent MLB so much I’d swear it off, by just how much weeb-worship they’re jizzing all over the internet like they’re watering a garden with a hose.  I get it, Yamamoto and Ohtani are playing phenomenally right now, but it’s not like nobody else in the history of Major League Baseball has ever caught fire in the midst of the playoffs and carried their teams to some hot streaks.

But MLB media has become more weeby than 76 anime conventions put together and they just can’t help themselves with how much spooging they’re doing over every little thing a Japanese player does, and there’s no length too great to stretch out in order to make all sorts of convoluted stats or combination of stats to fit the narrative that only Shohei Ohtani is the only person in history to accomplish, so they can cliché-ly end with “that’s it.”

Thankfully, last night was a reminder that there are stalwart baseball players in existence that aren’t from glorious Nippon, and that the Dodgers true captain is the one who bailed them out of an 18-inning purgatory with once again, calling game in the most dramatic of fashions, the walk-off home run.

Freddie Freeman became the ONLY PLAYER in MLB HISTORY to have multiple walk-off home runs in the World Series, now having done it in 2025 a year removed from when he walked off the Yankees last year. 

That’s it.

And I know that I’m rooting against the Dodgers just like the the vast majority of the world outside of Los Angeles and entire country of Japan, but there is no part of me that is capable of hating Freddie Freeman, even if he is on the team.  I am happy for his second walk-off homer in the World Series, and I’m happy for his family to have been able to witness him once again bail the entire team out and be Mr. Hero, the only one genuinely worthy of such, on a roster full of guys that MLB really wants to be Mr. Hero instead.

Despite the fact that he plays for the Dodgers, an act of heroism by Freddie Freeman, at least to me, is still kind of a big middle finger to MLB, their media machine and all Dodgers fans that overlook his own greatness because they’re all too busy drooling over Ohtani or Yamamoto or even Roki for no other reason than that they’re shiny Japanese imports.

Lest everyone forgets, Freddie, and Mookie Betts, were guys who had their own championship rings before last year, and knew how to win without a $1B payroll and malleable management to make a cultural shift to cater to players, and it’s not a far stretch to say that without their leadership and guidance, they wouldn’t have won last year, where Ohtani had to be carried across the finish line by Freddie Freeman who went gangbusters in mauling the Yankees all series long.

I still want the Dodgers to lose in the end, which doesn’t really seem like a likely possibility, but I’m at peace if Freddie Freeman snaps out of his general postseason underperformance, and it subsequently helps the Dodgers win, because like I said, it’s impossible for me to be mad about anything that Freddie Freeman does, because he’s just that good of a human being that even him playing on the most reviled of teams doesn’t change my appreciation of him one bit.

The Dodgers are inevitable

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Here’s the thing about writing about baseball playoffs: if you don’t write for a living and are financially obligated to have the time necessary to write about baseball at a moment’s notice, you’re probably not going to do so until you have available time to do so.  Which then makes you me, where I never have any time to write about things on a moment’s notice no matter how much I might think I have something that will read remotely readable, so you get to it when you can get to it.

However, the baseball playoffs go at such a rapid pace, if it takes me about 5-7 days to get to something, literally two rounds of the playoffs could have ended by then, which is sort of what did happen to me in this case.

At first, I wanted to write about Balakey Snell, and add onto how he clearly saves all of his effort for second half of the year, after he absolutely shut down the Reds in the Wild Card round.  The man has made a career of dodging work in the first halves of the seasons, with the two exceptions being the two years where he played with his balls on fire in order to win Cy Young Awards, which coincidentally aligned up with upcoming arbitration and free agent payday, to which once he got a contract, he’d loaf the first half of every year, faking injuries and suppressing his talent, and then going gangbusters the second halves of every year like clockwork.

But then the Dodgers won two games immediately to advance out of the Wild Card round, and onto the Phillies, where I wanted to write about the joys of watching two teams I dislike having to duke it out amongst each other, and when push came to shove, I’d have to support the Phillies over the Dodgers because frankly I don’t give a shit who wins the World Series – as long as it’s not the Dodgers.

Unfortunately, the Dodgers breezed through the first two games of the series, and put the Phillies on the brink of elimination, and mythical wife put game 4 on television as background noise, leading me to passively watch as I witnessed players on both teams flailing away pitifully as if it were me playing a video game, racking up strikeout after strikeout, and I actually found the game to be almost unwatchable, at how place discipline has clearly eroded tremendously over the last decade in which I’d gradually reduced how much baseball I watched.

I got triggered over how the TBS broadcasters, one of which turned out to be former Brave Jeff Francoeur, whom I’d had a contentious opinion of over the years, but the two of them just could not stop fellating themselves over Japanese rookie, Roki Sasaki, whom the Dodgers had decided to stash away entirely, unleashing him as their tentative playoff closer, which was working to great effect.

To Roki’s credit, he did pitch masterfully, pitching three perfect innings in relief, but at the same time the Phillies would have swung at kickballs being rolled on the ground by virtue of their complete lack of plate discipline, but it was obnoxious as fuck listening to the commentary of two dorks with the same gigantic weeb fetishes that MLB really loves  to push.

But then the Phillies were eliminated and it was onto the NLCS, in the blink of an eye.  In the first game, Balakey Snell pitched another gem, going eight, near-perfect innings, adding to the ridiculous talent suppression narrative, but before I could write about that, game 2 happened the following night where Yoshinobu Yamamoto pitches a complete game, the Dodgers win, and the sports world is jizzing all over the place at A Glorious Nippon baseball player demonstrating such brilliant mastery in the playoffs, much to my annoyance.

Meanwhile, golden boy Shohei Ohtani has been completely invisible for the second October in row, going 1-for his last like 20 or so at-bats, but nobody wants to dare hear ill about their demi-god.

I had a great analogy for a writing topic about how MLB feels like the League of Legends LCS scene where every team in every region came to the collective conclusion that they need to import as many Korean players onto their teams as they could, leading to a few years of hilarity where teams all over North America, Europe, China and even teams in Brazil, all had two Korean players on their rosters. 

And how MLB feels like it’s headed in that direction where teams are going to be scrambling to gobble up Japanese players because they’ll all buy into the notion that they need them in order to compete, and that the Dodgers are just one of the earliest teams to really exploit the system, much like teams like Fnatic, LMQ and G2 were early adopters of hoarding Koreans in LCS, before all teams eventually picked up on it and began poaching Koreans left and right.

But that brings us to the present, where the Dodgers won game 3 of the NLCS, where they now have a near-lock to make the World Series because no team except 2004 Boston Red Sox had ever come back from an 0-3 series deficit to win four in a row, and everything I wanted to make dedicated posts about are already in the past and not worth dedicating entire posts about anymore.

And all I really have to say at this point is the subject of this post – the Dodgers are inevitable.  They didn’t just buy themselves a loaded roster, they bought themselves a loaded roster, intelligently.  That’s the one major separator from them and every other team in baseball history that has thrown cash around like they were at a strip club, but resulted in no positive results.  Sure, some of them were victimized by the hot team, but this era of Dodgers has appeared to be hot team-proof.  No hot team or higher seed really makes a difference when they get loaded up into a short series with a team that has this much pitching depth, amassed effective relievers from other teams, and has this many available bats on their roster, all of which seem to be drunk enough on the Kool-Aid to not be letting any toxic egos into the equation.

I doubt I’m the only one who came into the playoffs with this sense of dread at seeing the Dodgers in, because most anyone who follows the game knows that they’re the team to beat, no matter where they were seeded going into it.  And sure enough, the Dodgers did what they were built to do, which is that they decimated the Reds and the Phillies, and have decimated the Brewers and by the time this day is over, could very well be en route to the World Series, yet again.

Like I said, I really don’t care who ultimately wins the World Series, but I really hope it’s not the Dodgers.  The fact that I would have preferred the Phillies over the Dodgers speaks volumes for those who know me.  If I had a preference, it’s the Seattle Mariners I’d rather see become champions for the first time in their franchise history, but I have no beef with the Blue Jays either.

But regardless of who comes out of the AL, I don’t like either of their chances against the amount of ammunition the Dodgers have, and they’re currently playing in a dominant manner that’s giving me some serious 2005 White Sox vibe, where their starters are just on another planet right now, delivering dominating performance one right after the other after another.  Even if they got completely bodied by the Angels all year.

This is most definitely one of those cases where I’d love to be wrong, and being right about an inevitable fucking Dodgers victory, will bring no joy whatsoever.

Justin Verlander is basically MLB’s Tom Brady

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

USA Today: Justin Verlander, 42, reportedly desires to keep playing despite having absolutely nothing left to prove, and having supermodel wife Kate Upton waiting at home

I saw this story about Justin Verlander wanting to keep playing past this season, and my mind was like wtf, why?  For the record, man has already accomplished:

  • Two-time World Series champion
  • Three no-hitters
  • 3x AL Cy Young Award winner
  • 1x AL MVP
  • AL Rookie of the Year
  • 9x All-Star

Surely it’s not money, because Verlander has already cleared over $400M in career earnings, and at that tier, it would take a Herculean effort of being a shithead to blow through it.  And it’s not like his wife is some financial leech, because he’s married to supermodel Kate Upton, whom Google claims has a net worth of $20M in her own right.

And speaking of Upton, it’s hilarious that he wants to keep staying on the road of living the life of a baseball player, instead of enjoying retirement with his bombshell of a wife and his two kids.  A cursory reaction is that in spite of the massive advantages he’s earned in his life, it seems like the life of being a husband and father is something that he’s not ready to commit to full-time, and the only thing preventing that from having to be a reality is, continuing to keep playing.

Frankly the only thing that seems remotely attainable and is a justifiable excuse to keep on trucking, is the pursuit of 300 career wins, which is something of a holy grail for pitchers and among the true milestones that separate the GOATs from the really goods.  However, he’s 35 wins away from that, and at the rate he’s going, he would need at least three more seasons, and get a ton of run support in order to have a chance at hitting 300, and by then he’ll be pushing 45, and most teams will probably be ready to take him out to the back of the pasture at that rate, especially if they’re going to be close to his 2025.

Getting back to the title of this post, Justin Verlander is basically MLB’s version of Tom Brady, the ageless star who has achieved just about everything there is to achieve, but continues to insist on playing, despite riches, achievements and a supermodel wife.

I guess us pleebs won’t ever be able to comprehend this innate desire to stay away from home and not settle down, or perhaps the adage of, every gorgeous woman is still someone’s colossal pain in the ass, rings true here and supermodels like Gisele and Kate Upton are as much head cases as they are attractive.

All the same, if I’m being honest, I feel like the Braves would be all in on being a match for Verlander, and I think the union could possibly work, at least for 2026.  The Braves are notorious for favoring aged stars on one-year deals, and the cheapskate org could possibly succeed at signing him for like 1-year, and maybe $13-14M.

The Braves would feel that they could extract the absolute last skill out of Verlander, and provided the team manages to bounce back from this abysmal 2025 campaign, they could be an ideal club to score a lot of runs again, with ol’ Justin to possibly be the beneficiary to them en route to 13 wins or so.

If the reports are true and he wants to keep going, I actually would expect the Braves to be in on Verlander for 2026.  His desire to not go home and be a family man could benefit the Braves, and lord knows they need all the help they can get for the future.

I sure as shit wouldn’t complain if he pulls a Tom Brady and jumps ship to a random team like the Braves and help them rip off a successful season en route to some World Series pay dirt.

Happy Trails, Roy Hobbs

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

AP: Actor and activist, Robert Redford dies at the age of 89

Throughout the long history of the brog, I’ve been saddened by the passing of many notable figures and shared my words and thoughts for those whom have meant the most to my general existence.  I’ve stated numerous names, of individuals who really had massive imprints on my general state of life, those whom help mold, shape or have a permanent residence at the forefront of my brain.

Guys like Sonny Chiba, Dikembe Mutombo, Kevin Conroy emerge quickly, as people for whatever reason or contributions to the shit I’ve seen in my life, always maintained permanent resident status in my head, and even to this day, guys whom I’ll make references to or think about when it comes to the countless analogies and metaphors and comparisons that I make when thinking about things around the world.

Well, Robert Redford is up there on that echelon of individuals in the world that left an indelible mark in my life, and I’m feeling melancholy about hearing about his passing.  I can’t really say that I’m so much sad about it considering he was 89 years old and had clearly lived a full and prosperous life, but for those that will miss him the most, my heart goes out to.

However, I should be more specific, that my general fandom and appreciation for Robert Redford stems from a role he played in a film, based on a book that also left an indelible impression in my life, which is The Natural by Bernard Malamud.  After falling in love with the book, the movie was enjoyable, which really opened my eyes to who Robert Redford was, as he was portraying the intrepid Roy Hobbs, the former pitcher turned old rookie wunderkind, crushing home runs all over the place with this homemade baseball bat.

And although the film didn’t portray it like the book did, Roy Hobbs was a human vacuum cleaner of a legendary eater, prompting one of my oldest friend groups and I to use his name as inspiration for whenever we wanted to destroy buffets all across Northern Virginia and eat like Roy Hobbs was trying to fill the void left in his heart from the early baseball career he never had.

Furthermore, Roy Hobbs became something of a pseudonym for me through a variety of online endeavors, like the pen name I wrote through on Talking Chop and a variety of other Vox websites, and was usually my go-to when it came to utilizing an online handle on gaming platforms like Xbox Live or League of Legends.

Regardless, through Roy Hobbs I learned Robert Redford, and although Roy Hobbs was but just a single role played in a legendary career, whenever the thought of Roy Hobbs emerges in my brain, it’s Robert Redford that I see, and for that alone, made me a fan of Robert Redford.

It’s funny, because as learned of his existence was I made aware of just how much work he’s done in Hollywood, for Hollywood, and the film industry in general, but it wasn’t until really reading several obituaries and tributes to the man did I realize just how much more he did, as far as his support for independents beyond just Sundance, as well as his activism, trying to make the world a lesser pile of shit than it is on the regular.

Robert Redford was truly an extraordinary human being, and it’s like I discovered him in a reverse order sort of fashion; gravitating towards him on account of a singular role, but then learning more about him after the fact, as opposed to the other way around.

It’s a sad day in Hollywood, film and even literature to hear about the passing of Robert Redford, but at least as far as I’m concerned, he’ll always be relevant and worth mentioning, if for anything at all, being the guy who was Roy Hobbs.

I always knew Ken Rosenthal was a little prick off-camera

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Yahoo: FOX sports reporter, Ken Rosenthal, getting dragged on the internet for his behavior of inadvertently knocking over a photographer and giving him a death stare instead of any sort of apology or help getting up

I’d be willing to wager that lots of baseball fans whom might have a shred of similar thinking to I might, probably all agree that there’s something about Ken Rosenthal that probably gives off this air of potential dick.  And then seeing video evidence of him accidentally trucking some poor Brewers photographer, and then instead of any sort of offering to help or motion of remorse, he just stands glaring down at a prone person on their back, uncomfortably long, before returning to conduct an on-field post-game interview; that’s all the internet needed, to race to the conclusion that most of us probably already hypothesized – Ken Rosenthal is a douche.

I mean just look at him, with his vast collection of dorky bow ties and his spray tans and bleached teeth.  Always ready with an artificial smile for the camera.  I get that he’s in media, and he’s trying to cultivate a brand for himself, so that he’ll always remain employed and not lose his job to some hotties working their way up in sports journalism.  But there’s always been this air of arrogance and inflated sense of entitlement that he belongs in MLB reporting or something that I can’t really capture in writing, but just trust me bro, it’s there kind of feelings.

Like, if you were to ask him about baseball in general, I bet he wouldn’t be able to name all 30 MLB squads, or be able to snap back with a favorite player if asked.  There’s just something about his whole presentation and existence that seems fake and artificial and just like this dorky little brother syndrome of clinging to MLB coverage that nobody would really miss if he were gone,

And then he has to go and get caught on video, reacting abruptly and as genuine as a quick reaction makes us do, and of course he gets a pass for running into a person, everyone in existence has done that before.  But it’s the death stare, and the disrespect, and the sheer lack of regard for another human being that has gotten the internet up in arms, and I am here for the Ken Rosenthal dragging, because the Braves suck, and it’s shit like this and all the Dodgers’ close no-hitters getting fucked that sustain my interest in a fledgling baseball season.

Seriously, the way Rosenthal was glaring down at this poor photographer, the closest thing I could liken it to was when Scottie Pippen dunked all over Patrick Ewing in the 94 playoffs, and then stood over him and glared down.  That’s the level of disrespect I gathered from this five second moment of him, and it entertains me tremendously seeing how such did not go unnoticed from the rest of the internet as well, and the ensuing reactions from all over the internet.

Especially funny are all the other rando people on the internet all basically saying the same shit I am of, I knew he was a [pejorative] all along, and then they cite the same shit that I did, most notably the bow ties.

Either way, I’m sure some calculated and hackneyed apology that nobody is going to buy is on the way, but as far as blunders of the 2025 MLB season, as entertained as I was by asshole Ken Rosenthal, I don’t think he’s going to have a snowball’s chance in hell at toppling Philly Karen.

LOL Dodgers

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Yahoo: Dodgers fall to the Orioles after the O’s score four runs in the 9th inning after being no-hit for 8 2/3 innings

As I’ve said a few times this season, mostly after the Dodgers were getting pwned all season by the lowly Angels, they’re probably going to be fine, and they’re probably going to be in the World Series later this season.  But man, when the Dodgers do fuck up, they fuck up in the most hilariously embarrassing ways possible.

I mean there’s honestly a much smaller list of ways to lose in a more embarrassing way than no-hitting a team through 26 out of 27 outs in a game, only for the opponent to go completely gangbusters with no more outs to play with and walk off in the blink of an eye, and I like to imagine Dodgers fans all around the world who were watching, anticipating witnessing a no-hitter, only for it to not only fall short, but for the wheels on the team to entirely fall off, and to immediately lose the game moments afterward.

In baseball, among the multitude of geeky stats and charts out there, is the win-expectancy metric, which measures the chance of victory for a team based on the outcome of every single pitch and out of the game.  The Dodgers went from 99.9% of winning the game going into the 9th inning, to a 100% loss in the span of minutes, and for fans like me, fewer things is more gratifying, satisfying and enjoyable to see than of all teams, it happening to the Dodgers.

I love all the people involved in this whole debacle too; the fact that it was Yoshinobu Yamamoto whom was on the precipice of greatness but then losing the no-hitter, the shutout and the complete game in one fell swoop, when he surrendered a home run to Jackson Holliday, a kid that I’m hoping still flourishes into the superstar that he was touted to be.  And then Blake Treinen, a kind of creepy right-wing bible thumper, who was brought in to close out the game, immediately walks two guys and gives up a hit to further deflate the Dodgers’ cushion from “salvage the win” to “oh shit we might actually lose.”  And when he failed to close out the game, they bring in Tanner Scott, the poor schmuck who is put in the unwinnable position to close out the game with baserunners on, naturally fails to do it, and the Dodgers go from 99.9% W to 100% L just like that.

It’s nonsense like this that I absolutely live for as a baseball fan, and despite the fact that the Dodgers are still the front-runners for another World Series, if they fail, everyone will be pointing at games like this one, or their inability to handle the Angels or Pirates, as reasons why they suck in spite of their go-zillion dollar payroll.

Phillies Karen: has to be the 2025 MLB Meme of the Year, right?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Countless: Nuclear viral moment captured when ‘Phillies Karen’ goes ballistic on a father over a caught home run baseball at a Phillies-Marlins game

When I first heard about this story, it was late in the evening and I didn’t really have the stamina to sit down and write about it, no matter how enticing of a topic it seemed like; hey, I’m wiped out by the evenings, I’m an old parent, tf off my nuts.  The following morning when I started to see it had caught fire and went viral, my kids were up, so I couldn’t really take the time to spout out my thoughts on the whole thing, and I’d occasionally check social media sporadically throughout the day only to see more and more coverage and development over the whole thing.

And by the time the kids were down and I had some time to write again, it had blown up so much, with so much traction and coverage on the whole thing, it became one of those scenarios where it’s like a hungry lion who leaps into a crowd of gazelle, but is unable to focus on any one of them, and instead scrambles around futilely, the gazelle all get away, and the lion is left hungry and overstimulated.

There’s so much to unpack about this whole thing that it’s difficult to really triangulate on any one aspect about it, and I don’t want to summarize the entire thing because it would take forever, and this has gotten so much coverage that there are likely way more efficient and better written takes about this whole thing than I could provide on a brog that nobody but me reads.

Like, I’m 100% in agreement with the dad who forfeited the ball pretty quickly, just to get out of the confrontation, no matter how much I’m sure I’d be able to argue it if I wanted to, but it’s one of those things that I’d rather not do in front of my entire family.  Real good on the Marlins’ PR and customer relations rep who showed up to give the dad’s kid a gift package, and I agree with lots of people on social media that more should be made about the staffer who came through for the family. 

And as much as I’m generally predisposed to root against the Phillies or any Philadelphia sports team for that matter, real-real good on the Phillies and Harrison Bader for reacting quickly to the story, and bringing the dad, his son, and the entire family into the personnel area for an impromptu meet and greet, and farm up positive karma and press.

But no matter all the good that came from this whole debacle, I don’t think at this point any ironic story is going to top the saga of Phillies Karen, as being the MLB Meme of the Year.  When the day is over, the bipartisan internet doesn’t gravitate towards the good of a story as much as they crave a tantalizing jerk for everyone to collectively point their crosshairs onto, which is precisely what happened with the internet going off on a massive witch hunt to try and identify and expose Phillies Karen for, basically being an asshole Karen caught on camera.

There’s been so much traction and movement in this story that it got to a point of not knowing what to believe is happening in the fallout.  Some claims that the person was identified and that they’ve already lost their job, some stories where the victim of mistaken identity has to defend herself, and naturally in this very recent day and age, a lot of AI, so much fucking AI, as far as fake photos and videos and all sorts of memes to already come into existence of everyone trying to get their slice of the internet attention in regards to a nuclear hot viral meme.

But the point is, this isn’t so obviously just the MLB Meme of the Year, this definitely has enough footing to be one of the most memorable memes of the year, just in general.  The Coldplay HR CEO guy meme people are probably breathing a sigh of relief at Phillies Karen taking the heat of getting caught on camera being an asshole, from him and his HR mistress.  Same goes for that Polish CEO who snatched the tennis player’s hat away from kid at the US Open, probably feeling real relieved that Phillies Karen has taken the heat away from him, especially after his cringeworthy ChatGPT-generated apology.

I mean the internet is all about what have you done for me recently, and any good meme is only as good until the next one emerges, but seeing as what has resulted from a singular action of some entitled old lady screaming at a dad over a $15 baseball, people out in public might just be a little more careful on how they act, especially when there’s the potential for television cameras to be recording everything, not to mention the hordes of randos who will whip out their phones and start recording at a moment’s notice at the slightest whiff of a potential confrontation.

But as much as I am enjoying the entertainment of a good meme come to life, what I’m really looking forward to is when the Phillies ultimately get bounced from the playoffs, there’s going to be all sorts of new and fresh memes and lots of fingers being pointed to this very specific moment of the baseball season, and the shit will just start all over again.

It’s funny too, because my general attitude towards Philadelphia and their sports culture had been softening over the last few years, but due to the emergence of Phillies Karen, it just gives me something to re-ignite the inevitable smug satisfaction of Philadelphia getting owned, and there being a very tangible totem or symbol of their future failures, that I look forward to others utilizing and spamming whenever it does happen.